Small-time true crime from New Castle, Pa.

James Dagres, “B & E”, 28 April 1934

In 1930, when James Dagres was twelve, his father, John, was given eighteen months to six years for breaking and entering and larceny, and so may not have been around in 1934, when James planned a robbery of his own.

One of James’s friends from school, Jack Cook, lived around the corner from an unoccupied furnished house on the north hill. Over a period of weeks, James, Jack and a third boy, LeRoy Shoaff, removed various items from the house—tables, chairs, a gas heater, a clock, a world atlas—and sold them to second-hand dealers in town. They were caught when the owner of the house, a local teacher, passed by and saw them carrying furniture out of the place. All three boys were minors. There is no record of any sentence. When James left school, he got a job at American Cyanamid & Chemical. LeRoy Shoaff went on to become a colonel in the US army. There is no further record of Jack Cook.

James got married in 1944. That summer, his father was sent to the Allegheny county workhouse for ten months for aggravated assault and battery, and so missed the birth of James’s son later that year.

Small Town Noir

The mug shots on this site were all taken in New Castle, Pennsylvania, between 1930 and 1960, and were rescued from the trash when the town's police department threw them out. The information that has been used to reconstruct the stories behind the pictures comes mostly from old copies of the local paper, the New Castle News.

The mug shots have been scanned in extra large. Click on them to see them full scale.